I am looking for a good eCommerce CMS.
I need to be able to sell services and products, it must be open source that it can be customised wherever needed.
I am very familiar with PHP and Mysql, and somewhat familiar with python and ruby, so a PHP solution would be preferred.
Some of the best PHP carts:
Magento - Full featured. Excellent code quality. Hard to learn. Requires lots of server resources.
PrestaShop - PrestaShop is currently used by 250,000 shops worldwide and is available in 60 different languages.
OpenCart - OpenCart comes with an inbuilt Affiliate system, where affiliates can promote specific products and get paid for this.
InterSpire - Not Free.
FoxyCart - Not Free. Hosted checkout that uses your templates. Works well with a CMS like Modx or Expression Engine.
LemonStand - Not Free.
I have two recommendations for you.
Dont use OSCommerce.
Dont use XTCommerce which is based on OSCommerce
To be more specific NEVER EVER use oscommerce for ANY project you want to extend at all. If you run the project 100% out-of-box and need some payment extension that nobody features consider it for two seconds but then better DONT. OSCommerce features code from 2001. OSCommerce has only one coding pattern which is FIXHACKCOPYQUICKPASTEHERENOW. Its the negation of everything you think to know from software development and project mangement. If you use OSCommerce and try to extend it your project will need twice as long and you will start hating webdevelopment. And yes i know it sounds like, but i am not kidding. Been there, done that.
If anybody tells you to use oscommerce - e.g. for all the existing extentions that are out there - stand up and leave the room.
Extra Tipps:
Magento IS SLOW.
http://www.prestashop.com/ - In the OSS world Prestashop has some popularity.
http://www.interspire.com/shoppingcart/ has some reputation but is not OSS.
I know you want to stick with Linux based but nopCommerce is amazing:
http://www.nopcommerce.com/
http://demo.nopcommerce.com/
For free you can't beat this.
Try Magento
Have you checked
http://www.oscommerce.com/
It was discussed here also:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143656/whats-the-best-free-and-opensource-php-ecommerce-solution-and-why
Regards
oscommerce- basically many features that you want, they have it. Only thing is it is in plugin format, you need to go to their forum to find the plugin to install.
I would recommend below:
interspire shopping cart- one of the most user friendly cart. Not free, but quality is there. I personally love this a lot.
Magento- is the open source software. Very good quality and functionality. BUT BUT BUT, eat up lot of server memory. If you want to go for this, start from semi dedicated server is your choice.
Related
I'm going to be building a website where people will be able to register, upload some digital content and make sales.
There will be features like users managing their own profiles, rating and commenting on other users' content, managing their digital inventory and integration with Paypal.
I've good experience with PHP, but I'm wondering if I could cut development time by using WordPress as a basis for the website instead of building from scratch or using a framework like CakePHP. What are peoples experiences with customizing WP (version 3 in particular) vs. coding from scratch in similar projects?
This sounds like a perfect use for Buddypress(http://buddypress.org/), a Wordpress plug-in. It adds user profiles and essentially allows them a Facebook-esque profile. Once the plug-in is installed you can get into the files and change things as you wish, so it's quite customisable, at least from my experience.
It really depends on the features you are building. I've had a lot of experience making WP do things other than blogging and if you don't know your way around it would be a hassle. I've also built a number of custom CMSs so I know about that route as well. If you're happy to allow users to use the WP admin panel for profile management etc. there shouldn't be too many problems.
The advantage you have with WP is the community - chances are whatever you're trying to do has been tried/done before so there should be an answer. Add to that the security features and vast library of plugins, and WP is a great choice.
It just depends on how complex your features are, and how comfortable you are with WP.
On the other hand, that has not been my experience. I've needed to add a user registration/security module but that wasn't stupid or frustrating, and other features have been valuable. But there is the usual learning curve. It's nice that it's ubiquitous and competition has worn off most of the warts.
We've built a couple of real estate sites using wordpress, but also sites where you can share your memories and stories. Wordpress is a real easy platform to use as a ground, sice all the basic functionality is already there, and also as #Tom Walters said, the community is really helpful.
I will start a little project with a shopping cart. I will need to make several modifications in the shopping cart.
So my question is "Which is the best PHP open source Shopping Cart" to work with and easy to modify.
Give me some clues.
Best Regards,
Prestashop
Having worked with virtually all major open source e-commerce platforms, this is by far my favorite. It's not as powerful as Magento, but it's very easy to learn how it works, create/modify modules and design templates. There's also a very active community and it's developed by a company that releases it as OpenSource, so it's being constantly improved. The new flagship version 1.4 is almost out (it's at RC5 right now).
Other alternatives are:
Magento: It's built using the Zend Framework and it's heavily MVC. If you're familiar with the Zend Framework, this might be a good solution for you. It's a lot more difficult and has a much steeper learning curve than PrestaShop.
TomatoCart: This is a fork of osCommerce 3.0 beta. The creators have tried hard to improve the platform, but osCommerce has a lot of rotten design and it's a mess to extend. I've tried creating a couple of modules and had many problems. There isn't much documentation to help you and the community is not very active.
VirtueMart: If you are familiar with Joomla, this might be an option. If you're not, you should stay away because you might have a few problems setting everything up correctly and integrate this component with your template.
osCommerce: Just stay away from this...
Magento is an easy leader at the moment. It's got lot's of up-to-date features and an easy to modify architecture. The downside that I've seen mentioned in other forums is that it's more suitable for technically minded people so might not be good for a beginner.
Zen Cart
I've built a few (3 or 4ish) sites using zen cart. It's free, and it does waaaaaay more than anything I've ever needed it to do.
I've also used Squirrel cart. It's not free ($170), but it is easy to implement and has great support.
I have used both Magento and OpenCart and I can say that Magento wins hands down in terms of :
available extensions and modules
search engine optimization
wide store management possibilities including products’ comparison
wish lists and smart customer accounts.
Effective multiple store management is Magento considerable advantage.
Concerning Open Cart, it has some benefits in terms of easy installation, as it's quite lightweight in comparison to Magento.
If you are planning little business without rapid development in the near future, OpenCart will be quite enough for you.
Magento is really demanding in terms of hosting, investment, efforts, so it better suits large size stores.
Like said above OpenCart is lightweight and simple to use.. recommended more for small stores and beginners..
Magento is way ahead and has larger extensions than opencart. magento is more technical to use.
Currently, I am looking to switch from a home grown eCommerce website to a custom site using a framework. I need something that can upscale (handle hundreds to thousands of transactions), is easily maintained, and simple to customize.
I was recommended the symfony framework by an outside source, but I have not previously heard of it. My understanding is that using something like symfony would still require integrating magento (or its ilk) for commerce on the back end.
Is there a better solution? Is there another platform that would fulfill all of my needs?
It's hard to say what platforms would suit your needs without knowing what they are :) Do you have specific requirements that are unusual in the ecommerce world? Having said that, a decent ecommerce framework will allow you to adapt the core functionality to suit your needs in a robust manner.
As #usoban suggests, Magento doesn't require Symfony, but it is built using the Zend Framework. So if you're familiar with the Zend patterns, then you will adapt to Magento much quicker.
Magento has a broad range of features "out of the box" and is certainly capable of scaling to large volumes of transactions and visitors.
It does require serious hardware and resource optimization in that high-end configuration, but there is a body of knowledge on how to achieve that both on the Magento site and elsewhere on the web. The Enterprise Edition is also designed for performance (includes Full Page Caching) along with features/functionality that are important for administration of serious ecommerce (content merging and staging, granular permissions, etc).
You will hear a lot of complaints about Magento's learning curve, and they are mostly justified, particularly if you are coming from a traditional PHP coder background. However, if you take the time to work through the tutorials, and recognize that the complexity is due to the power and flexibility of the system, you are likely to find it worthwhile. Also, us StackOverflow peeps reckon that you'll get much better support here than on the Magento forums :) There tends to be some questionable advice there, at least here you can see what the peers think of the answers :)
Hope all this helps!
JD
There are bundles now was developped for this purpose. Some of them can give you a lot of functions like Cart management, products by categoris,...
This is a bundle that can help you sylius
Also, you can base your developpement on vespolina which is in production now.
Drupal 8, now uses some componenets of SF2, and in the future it will be developped entirely on the top of symfony. So you can start using Drupal 8 but it's in developpement stage also.
Using symfony2 will give you the possibility to use also ezPublish 5 and PHPBB4.
As you can see, most of PHP CMS and business projects are moving to SF2. And the reason is very simple, SF2 has implemented the JSR Specifications but not in JAVA language, in PHP5.3
I advice you to try it first for a small project first to learn the best practices implemented by sf2, specially the IoC (Inversion of Control) also called Dependency Injection.
I have worked with symfony in several projects (one of them is a custom e-commerce site built from scratch), and I'm very happy with this framework.
If you plan to use Magento as a backend and symfony for the frontend, I'd suggest you to use Drupal Commerce http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce because Magento is a heavy piece of software. You can even forget about symfony and extend drupal to fulfill your needs.
An alternative to Symfony could be Zend Framework http://framework.zend.com
ZenMagick is an on-going project that uses a lot of Symfony2 compoenents. It is currently at version 0.9.11. The homepage describes it as
Originally based on Zen Cart, it has evolved into a flexible and robust system of its own, that allows you to get the shopping cart you want.
For while now I have been using ezpublish as a framework, and CMS when my web projects are based on PHP, and I must say, I have grown accustomed to it because of its flexibility for most scenarios.
However, I've had to build e-commerce sites now and then, and ezpublish includes a webshop that caters for the e-commerce needs of your installation, and of-course with all the tools you need to extend, should you need to.
Is it worthwhile and optimal to use the inbuilt webshop for an e-commerce solution, or should I rather go with an all out e-commerce solution like Magento, which has made a significant impact in that sector?
Some have made the choice of using both solutions, connected with each other ( www.ezgento.org ). Can be achieved mostly due to the very open architecture of eZ Publish. I do not have enough insight on the Magento side, so i can not tell whether it is easily "pluggable" too.
I know for fact that some ez Publish Community members are building large-scale e-shops with eZ Publish, either as a pure Content Management tool, serving content and only content to dedicated ecommerce tools, either as an integrated solution, then relying on the built-in webshop module.
I am sure you would get a fruitful discussion if asking your question directly in eZ Publish's community : http://share.ez.no/forums
Hope it helps,
Cheers,
Magento is great. It's chock full of features that you would normally pay a lot of money for in a shopping cart (or spend an eternity implementing yourself). Mostly anything you don't have in the base installation you can get from the community.
But it's extremely complicated. Expect to step a lot of time setting up your store, as the default install is not ready to go. Expect to spend time adding a template, which will take much longer than you expect. Expect to stretch your PHP skills in ways that you cannot anticipate.
Generally, Magento is not the "fast" option, nor the "easy" one, just the good one. If none of that dissuades you, it's a great option :)
Hope that helps. Thanks,
Joe
eZ Publish has Payment Gateways
It allows you to define precisely segment you category/products/prices/taxes/currencies in a flexible way
it is secure
eZ's technology is based on Open Standards and XML, which means that eZ Publish integrates natively with most of the payment gateways, as well as with many leading CRM and ERP solutions like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Navision or SAP.
It integrates with Online Marketing Suites in order to segment customers and provide advanced content-centric analytics
eZ Find, built on top of Lucene/solR, gives backthe relevancy of search results, and providing new ways of navigating content (facets, etc.)
It has a good cache system
See official pres about eZ Publish + eCommerce for more infos
We're planning on setting up a website for student group - most of the content is fairly static but certain portions such as events and members would turn up from the database. I've never worked with PHP much, and was wondering would a CMS system like Drupal or PHP Nuke be appropriate for this kinda work?
Is there anything else that would allow me to go about creating a template and then reusing it across the website?
Drupal would be a very good choice for this. It has its learning curve, - anything you choose will. But eventually the light bulb will go off and you'll see how logically its organized and how flexible it is to extend.
And there are vast resources available to help you get up to speed quick. Tutorials and videos touching all angles of how Drupal works. And then there are uncountable quantity of themes, hundreds of add-on modules of every kind.
With a handful of additional modules added to the core distribution (cck certainly, maybe views and taxonomy too) you can configure basically everything and not ever touch a line of PHP code.
It is extremely simple to install and get started with. I have both Drupal 5 and 6 running under xampplite on a lil MSI netbook! .. Downoad and be up and running in under 15 mins.
You can try out all of the CMS available # http://php.opensourcecms.com.
I've never used PHP Nuke before, but Drupal can easily do the job.
Check out the Calendar module in Drupal for the event function.
Try out Joomla! works the best not just in content management but also theres extensions that you can use to allow users to book meetings and schedule events. Easy and simple.
Try out the +Joomla! instalation and hosting and just worrie about contents! They will put the rest working for you for super cheap price.
I recommend Joomla 1.5. It is easy to use and tons of resources on the web. Good for newbie.